Элисон Скотч - The Theory of Opposites

“You lost the account, Willa. William. Willa William Willabee. And I hold you solely responsible!” She has retrieved the poster from the corner to which she ceremoniously kicked it and has now started shredding it into teeny, tiny pieces, tossing them around her desk like confetti.

“I, well, I’m not sure that’s fair…I mean, you weren’t even….”

“Oh it’s fair! They said you were texting through half the goddamn meeting!” she shrieks.

A quiet falls on the cubicles outside. I can hear it — I can sense them all turning to stare — just as she balls up the remainder of the poster and aims it at my head. She misses, and it bounces off the glass partition behind me.

“And even if it’s not fair, too bad for you. Because I just got canned. And so that means that you are getting canned too!”

She exhales and flops into her chair, like she has literally just performed an exorcism.

“Wait.” It dawns on me. “I’m fired?”

“Alan was given my job this morning.”

“ Alan Alverson?”

“Live free or die, Willabee. Live free or fucking die.”

“I don’t…” I snap my mouth shut because I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about, much less how to respond.

She rolls her head upward and meets my gaze square on.

“No,” she says slowly. “You don’t . You never do.”

The TV is blaring when I unlatch the apartment door, which is odd because Shawn is at an all-day coding conference. I abandon my half-filled cardboard box on the floor. It turns out that the accumulated contents of five years of dedicated work don’t amount to all that much: a few insignificant industry awards (my campaign for a dandruff shampoo was nominated for an Obie but lost to Herbal Essences), a framed photograph of me with David Hasselhoff (he was the spokesman for an engine oil we repped), some documents that I’ll probably never look at again.

I reach into the box and grab a fistful of papers. Just to be totally sure that, in fact, I truly do not look at them again, I cram them into wads and throw them in the garbage, slamming the lid shut with force. But it’s one of those automatic lids that eases its way closed, so it just sort of lingers in the air, then slowly begins its descent. I watch it make its pitiful fall when the noise from the living room brings me back.

Why is the TV on so goddamn loud?

I head to the couch and run my hands under the pillows, in search of the remote, and then I realize: Shit. Shawn may be here. And he may not be alone. (!!!!) My mind spins in all the various ways that my life is about to become undone: that the universe giveth me Shawn and also taketh him away. I duck under the side of the sofa, because that’s what they do in the movies, and I don’t know what the hell else to do. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut and wish that I’d called that therapist.

Shawn may be here and he may not be alone! Grape! It doesn’t matter that I’m his Switzerland! He might be defecting.

A toilet flushes, and I press myself further into the couch, like that can render me invisible. I squeeze my eyes shut. There are footsteps ( one set or two?) , and then the bounce of the cushion as someone settles back in on the sofa.

Suddenly, from above me, I hear a voice that is most definitely not Shawn’s say, “Hey.”

“Holy shit!” I scream and jump to my feet.

Nicky starts cackling, curling himself into a ball and flat out howling.

“Oh my God, Jesus! You should have seen your face.”

My chest cavity feels like it might detonate.

“God, Nicky, you startled me. What are you doing here? Don’t you have school today?”

He shrugs, like that’s an explanation for whether or not he has school today.

“Does your mom know you’re here?”

“She knows I’m coming here tonight.” He locates the remote and turns it up a click, as if actively attempting to blow out my eardrum.

“Turn it down!” I shout.

“What?” he shouts back.

His eyes return to the screen. He’s watching a documentary on venomous spiders, and at this exact moment, a hairy, slithery tarantula gets its close-up. Nicky’s mom had warned us that he was going through “a dark period.” That he was increasingly becoming consumed with death, not least his father’s and why it happened and what it meant in the grand scheme of things. But Amanda didn’t have any explanations for that, for Kyle’s fate, just as none of the other 3000 families had explanations. How do you explain to a child that his dad went to work one morning, a morning like any other, and then nineteen terrorists decided that it was the right time to fly a plane into his building, and that’s what ended his life, even when his wife had just discovered that she was pregnant, and really, Kyle’s life in many ways had just begun?

You can explain the facts and include all of the right words, the right adjectives, the right level of vitriol and disgust, but still, after all of that, there is no explanation, no answer to his question of “Why?”

My dad would say, of course, that there is no correct answer to “why” because there is no rational answer to begin with. “Such is life,” he would say, as if he invented this phrase, which he didn’t, even though millions of his readers have been brainwashed to think that he had.

I take the remote from Nicky and lower the volume two beats. The tarantula has taken down its victim now: a field mouse that is at least twice its size. Nicky is rapt, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching the feast. I sit beside him, and he breaks from his gaze and offers me an impish grin.

“This is pretty effed up, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I sigh. The mouse is gone now — deader than dead, felled by a threat it never saw coming.

“Yeah,” I say again. Then I add: “This really is pretty effed up.”

Excerpt:

New York Times bestseller, Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control, p. 73.

In 1975, my colleagues at the University of Australia, Brisbane, conducted a study on 400 rats. They constructed a series of mazes (the maze being a metaphor for our lives, dear reader), and along the way of each maze, placed a series of traps, of temptations, of obstacles. At the end of the maze sat a pungent piece of cheese — the scientists settled on Roquefort, and thus, this experience was deemed the Roquefort Files, a tongue-in-cheek shout-out to the lead scientist’s favorite show, The Rockford Files. (A wonderful play on words that I only wish I had coined myself!)

They gave approximately one-third of the rats a tiny nibble of the cheese before placing them in the starting gate, so these animals understood (and sensed, both literally and intellectually) what they were hunting for. (You surely see the metaphor here too, dear reader, correct? That they were introduced to their end game, just as humans often set their own end game, their own personal aspirations. Which, if you’ve read this far into the book, you know I believe are completely out of our control.) The remainder of the rats either got a sniff of the cheese or…got nothing. (Welcome to life, fair rodents!)

My colleagues’ goal was to determine whether or not when offered a variety of temptations or alternate routes to the cheese, the rats who understood the reward and the task at hand would be less swayed to stop along the way in the maze, if they would work diligently toward the goal, even when traps were sprung, when marbles were rolled in their direction, when loud noises should startle them in the opposite direction. And whether or not these rats would have a higher success rate than the rats who weren’t yet sure of what they were working for or had only had a literal sniff of the grand prize.